First home buyers and entry-level investors are the heaviest users of suburb median data. They are also the buyers most likely to be researching the suburbs where that data is least statistically reliable. The irony is not accidental - it follows directly from how affordable markets work.A median figure for an outer affordable suburb sits alongside

The Adelaide house price median is the number everyone quotes and almost nobody interrogates. It appears in news headlines, agent appraisals, and suburb reports as though it were a precise measurement of what property is worth. It is not. It is a measurement of what sold - and those two things are only the same when the composition of what sold sta

Most people decide to sell before they know what selling actually costs.Most vendors commit to selling well before they have run the full numbers. The motivation arrives first. The costs arrive later - some before listing, some during the campaign, and some only at settlement.The cost of selling a house in Australia is not a single number. It is a

Most vendors spend more energy negotiating the the agent commission than they spend evaluating whether the agent can actually negotiate on their behalf.That instinct is understandable. Commission is the most visible cost of selling a house. Because it is expressed as a percentage of an unknown sale price, it often becomes the number vendors focus o

There is an irony at the centre of how first home buyers use property data. The buyers who rely most heavily on suburb medians to make their decisions are typically researching the suburbs where those medians are least reliable.The median for an affordable outer suburb and the median for a high-volume inner suburb look the same in a data table. Sam